I was on vacation when the news came through that Twitter was going to archive all past and future tweets with the Library of Congress. I'm a big fan of Twitter.
If you thought a puzzle of a Jackson Pollock painting was bad, wait until you try out the next step - reality.
XMG Studios, a gaming company that won a "Best App Ever" award for its last augmented reality game Pandemica, released yesterday its next entry into the AR gaming field, Jigsaw Live.
Although the privacy issues surrounding Facebook's new, opt-out only data sharing policies are making people uncomfortable, one area where folks are apparently happy to have their private data shared is on their mobile phones. And by private data, we mean exact GPS coordinates. Coordinates that are shared with software developers, ad networks and location-based service providers in return for free location-based mobile applications and geo-targeted ads.
In fact, one in four U.S. adults use mobile location-based services, according to a survey put out by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) last week. And nearly half of those users are responding to the included location-based ads.
At last week's F8 developers' conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled plans to offer "instant personalization" all over the Web - a way for websites to become instantly more social. Without even signing in, sites gain access to publicly available Facebook information like your name, profile picture, friend list and more, in order to personalize your experience on the site. At launch, only three partner sites are offering this feature: Microsoft's new Docs.com, Internet radio Pandora and user review site Yelp. You can opt-out of this experience if you like, but by default, you're opted in.
A new study released earlier this month seems to contradict findings from Pew Internet Project's February report on the declining blog authorship and blog readership among the youngest generation of online users. Instead of seeing a downward trend in blogging, the latest research appears, at first glance, to have us questioning those prior reports.
According to the latest study, this one from BlogHer and iVillage (red flag?) and co-sponsored by Ketchum and The Nielsen Company, young adults known as "Millenials" are the top demographic group in both reading and writing blogs, with nearly one third reporting they read blogs and just over 40% saying they blog themselves.
So was the earlier study - the one claiming "kids don't blog" anymore - wrong?
PC maker Lenovo announced today that the company expects its mobile Internet products to account for 10%-20% of revenue in five years' time. This statement comes from President and COO, Rory Read, delivered at a media briefing that coincided with the launch of the newest Lenovo "LePhone" smartphone device in China. With the phone, a handset running the Google Android mobile OS, Lenovo hopes to grab a good-sized chunk of the still-emerging Chinese smartphone market.
A Redmond-based startup is introducing a location-based social sharing service called Glympse. With a mobile application that works on iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile devices, users share their location (aka a "Glympse"), allowing their friends to see that location on another phone or on any other Internet-connected device. Senders can customize who gets to see the Glympse they post, whether the recipient is just one person, a group, or even everyone they've added as a friend on a social network like Facebook or Twitter.
The interesting twist to this service isn't the location-sharing aspect, of course - there are dozens of companies that allow for that today - it's the service's real-time nature and the thoughtfully included privacy features. Using a patent-pending timer option, Glympse users specify how long their location is visible to which select group of friends, with a maximum time of four hours before the location data expires.
Xtify's recently launched geo-messaging platform is demonstrated in a new YouTube video created by Motorola, makers of popular Android devices like the Motorola Droid smartphone. The Xtify geo-location platform and its associated SDK (software development kit) was announced at February's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. With the SDK, developers can integrate geo-targeted messaging into their applications, starting with Google's Android mobile operating system and later arriving to the Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile and iPhone operating systems.
Prepare for your mobile apps to get a lot more pushy.
Apple sold over 500,000 iPads in its first week, but that trend doesn't have execs at Intel convinced that the iPad is at all ushering in a new era of tablet computing. Speaking to the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing, David Perlmutter, co-general manager of Intel's Architecture Group, seemed a bit down about the whole touch-based computing thing. "These new categories are hard to predict," he said, and then went on to talk about how well netbooks were doing.
What has us confused about this negative sentiment isn't the fact that Intel downplayed the tablet market - after all, its chips aren't present in a good many of the tablets emerging now on the market. It's that they came at the same time as a rather important announcement from the chip giant: Intel has ported Google's Android operating system to its Atom microprocessor.
SublimeVideo, an HTML5-based video player from Switzerland-based development and design firm Jilion now includes a "fall back to Flash mode." This means that when a web surfer using a browser that doesn't support HTML5 visits a page that uses the player, it will automatically switch over (aka "fall back") to Adobe Flash, the plugin-based technology that older, non-HTML5 web browsers use.
Why is this important? In addition to providing a path to move from one technology to the next, a transition that will take years at best, SublimeVideo could ease the workload for developers tasked with creating web pages that the entire web audience can access.
